During the 1630s Isaac Allerton found himself increasingly at odds with
his fellow Plymouth colonists, and the English colonial population of
New England exploded. Historians have long noted that New England's colonies took firm root during the 1630s largely as the result of a massive immigration by English protestant refugees who were escaping persecution at home.
Equally important for the web of Native American and intercultural alliances
that encompassed the eastern seaboard from the Chesapeake to Iroquoia, this
was also the decade in which the older English colonization in the Chesapeake
finally took hold in far more successful fashion. As in New England, English
expansion in the Chesapeake was driven in large part by an increase in the
numbers of immigrants, along with reduced colonist mortality.

The story of the 1630s, then, is one of both colonial development and the
growth of the intercultural fur trade. Just when New England colonists like Isaac
Allerton sought to expand trade networks from their colonies, the Chesapeake
settlements also included people who tried to develop networks between
Virginia, other colonies, and Indian nations. The increasing number of trade
networks during the 1630s depended on intercultural alliances, and establishing these connections was one of the primary reasons that native peoples and
Europeans worked so assiduously to map one another.

Before tobacco, the fur trade not only gave Virginia its first major export
product but also shaped many intercultural relations for the first thirty years
of the colony's history, peaking in the 1630s.1 Indeed, throughout eastern
North America, the 1630s witnessed a great increase in the fur trade.2 Native

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